"Where Revolution is the Solution" Taking back the Empire

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First of all, I thought last night’s State of the Union rivaled anything that Ronald Reagan did. It was just astonishingly effective. President Trump found specific individuals whose stories weren’t just important as wonderful human stories, but they each illustrated a part of the American tapestry in the American culture in a way that reminded all of us America is such a wonderful country. I thought it was a very powerful and very effective speech.

I also have to comment on Ronna and the financial report at the end of the year. She hit the ground running with a very simple model that said, “I’m going to work with the president. I’m going to help the president. How big of a check are you going to write?” And she must have repeated that a hundred thousand times over the past year, and she has been very, very effective.

Now, I came tonight in part because I think the Republican National Committee really matters. I’ll tell you candidly, I think without Reince Priebus and without the Republican National Committee, we would not have won in 2016 because we needed all of the extra effort, and we frankly needed Reince desperately holding the party together all through the spring when about a third of the party was certainly eager to commit suicide. And without that kind of effort and without the ground game of the fall, we would have lost. It’s just that simple.

Similarly, I believe the Republican National Committee under Ronna’s leadership is going to be decisive this year. So, I’m going to talk just a couple of minutes about where we’re at because I think it’s really important. And I know those of you who are on the committee are going to take it seriously and take it as a personal responsibility, and those of you who are friends of the committee are even going to take it seriously.

I’m going to start with a very simple model. How many of you noticed [during the State of the Union] that Nancy Pelosi wasn’t happy? Now, I have a ground rule, when the president won, I said to every conservative I would talk to, every time you start to get mad at Donald J. Trump, I want you to close your eyes and think: President Hillary Clinton. Well, I would say to every one of you, every day this year that you do not work for a Republican majority, I want you to think about Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I think this is a very grave threat.

I’m going to be very direct, and I hope it doesn’t get misinterpreted. I do not believe the traditional Republican Party could win this fall. And the fact is we’re at an edge of a wave election, and if we end up with a wave election on their side, you can’t raise enough money to win normal races against that kind of wave.

We saw it in 1994 when we did it. We saw it in 2006 when the Democrats did it. We saw it in 2010 when John Boehner came up with a very simple model: Where are the jobs?

If you start getting that kind of wave building, it’s very hard to be able to keep control. And our margin is not that big. In the great 62-year period of Democratic dominance of the House, they would start elections with 60-seat majorities. If they lost 25 or 30 seats, their margins would shrink, but they were still in control. We’ve never been in control with that size margin.

For us to maintain Speaker Ryan and the House GOP majority in 2018 there are bold things we have to do.

I’m going to draw a very deliberate distinction. Just so you understand this isn’t just some theory — get candidate Trump’s speech at Gettysburg in October of 2016, the president’s inaugural address last year, and the State of the Union you just watched Tuesday. Take those three and read carefully what President Trump says.

He is describing an American party that reaches out to every American, that makes the case that America is an idea worth fighting for. He suggests that we have a model for success: the American model of limited government, lower taxes, less red tape, more entrepreneurship, more take-home pay, more local control, which means more local responsibility, and a foundation of rights that come from our Creator.

You take those three speeches, put them together, and look at them. What does that mean? What would a Trump Republican Party be like? We are not yet there. With Ronna’s leadership and the president’s leadership, we can get there. I think by 2020, we will get there.

I think President Trump will get re-elected almost without regard to what happens this fall. But remember, it’s one thing to spend 2019 and 2020 with Speaker Ryan and a Republican House getting things done. It’s another thing to spend 2019 and 2020 in a life and death struggle against Speaker Pelosi and a Democratic House that will automatically want to impeach the president while having every House Committee launch investigations of the administration. They won’t have any idea what they’re impeaching him for and or what they are investigating for and it won’t matter to them. In the majority, House Democrats will spend two years in hostile assaults on the administration.

You may have seen the Fox and Friends interview of the New York University students who they asked on Monday morning, “What did you think of the president’s State of the Union speech?” And these students said things like it was, “Hateful. It was racial language. I can’t believe he said that.” It didn’t even matter that President Trump hadn’t given the State of the Union Address yet. This is the unthinkingly hostile Left we’re dealing with.

What you saw at the State of the Union was the face of hate. I mean when people sit there, and you explain to them that there’s the lowest black unemployment in history, and they can’t applaud. There’s the lowest Hispanic unemployment in history, and they can’t applaud. You’re looking at people so consumed by their passions they can’t think. Those are the people who will be in charge of the House if they win.

So, these next few months are really important, and here are a couple of very simple principles for a Trump Republican Party as opposed to a traditional Republican Party. Now, a Trump party largely grows out of the Reagan party and out of the 1994 Contract with America majority.

First Principle: Go home and take on everyone. Don’t talk about safe seats, not safe seats, all this bologna. When we won control in 1994, we ran against every Democratic candidate except three.

We beat the chairman of Ways and Means of downtown Chicago. We beat the first Speaker of the House to lose since 1862. We beat the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Houston suburbs. No Republican consultant would have recommended running against any of them.

We are in a similar situation this year because every Democrat went out idiotically and voted no on the largest tax cut in your lifetime, and they have to go home and explain that.

One example from the State of the Union : We are not tough enough, we’re not fast enough, we don’t think aggressively enough. Last night, they picked somebody to answer the State of the Union, Congressman Joe Kennedy. He was symbolically perfect standing in front of a broken car because the Democrats can’t fix anything.

We should have been asking Kennedy, “How could you vote against tax cuts and job creation? The Ways and Means Committee has analyzed every congressional district in the country. You can go to the Ways and Means Committee website for your district. In Kennedy’s district a median-income family of four got a $5,800 tax cut. Now we should be all over him. How can he vote to take $5,800 away from a family of four in his district to send it to Washington bureaucrats?We should have used every social media tool so people watching his response were waiting for him to answer for his vote.

Now, he’ll give you a left-wing answer. If you’re one of the families, how many have gone to find families of four and say, “What can you do with $5,800 per year, which is, by the way, $58,000 over 10 years? Do you think it’s better spent by a bureaucrat or you?” I think we should take on every single member of the black caucus. Again, every single district in America, it turns out, has a net tax cut. Every single one of the Democratic members of the Black caucus voted against the tax cut for their own people and could not applaud the lowest Black unemployment in history.

Now, you can’t get much further distance from the traditional Republican consultants. but the truth is, too many Republicans don’t have the nerve to go out to new neighborhoods and new voters. They talk in cost-benefit terms. Well, that’s not going to work if we are serious about growing a stable majority. I lost twice. And if we’d had that cost-benefit attitude toward my district, I’d never have gotten to Congress, and we wouldn’t have taken control in 1994.

We have to have the nerve to go nose-to-nose.

Second, don’t complain about the news media. The news media is a fact. The news media is the offensive wing of the other team. They are not the problem. They are a fact. What we do about them is the problem. So, we have to design a campaign plan, and we have to train our candidates assuming the worst about the news media. Whenever you interact with the news media you should assume you’re going into a war zone. You should plan to take the host head on and challenge their assumptions.

I read the transcripts every Sunday. You would be amazed how many of our folks are too slow, too untrained, and don’t know what they’re talking about. So, they walk in as though George Stephanopoulos is neutral. I mean not only was he the Clinton press secretary, who gave $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and we allowed him to chair a presidential debate in 2012. Now, you at least have a minimum rule. Nobody who’s completely on the Left is going to get to chair anything for this party’s good future.

Point One: Compete everywhere.

Point Two: Design strategies that win despite the news media because you overmatch them.

Point Three: We have to have the courage to fight. You have to be prepared. When someone gets up, the junior senator from New York, and says, “You know, if you talk about chain migration, it’s racist.” But we need to say: “You must be losing this debate on the facts so badly that you’re now reduced to scream ‘racism,’ which is, by the way, what you scream about virtually anything, unless of course that’s homophobia or something else.” The Left has no arguments left except to yell nasty names.

And we have to go nose-to-nose with them to knock them down mentally and psychologically. It’s very important for us to understand this is a fight. We are in a cultural civil war with people who despise us. There’s no neutrality in there. And that’s why they dislike Trump so much, because Trump has the nerve to talk about MS-13 because they can’t answer it. The more he is right, the more enraged they are.

If you’re a left-wing Democrat and totally for open borders, you can’t actually go up and say, “Well, I think it’s okay for a few hundred MS-13 folks to come in.” You just can’t. So, then you get furious at Trump because he’s found the angle of attack you can’t defend.

I would say to every candidate: study Trump. Trump is one of the greatest articulators I have ever seen. He understands fighting. He likes to fight, and he is prepared to figure out how to go at you at an angle you can’t defend. And that’s what we have to do for this whole campaign starting now.

The most useful book I have read to better understand this year is Karl Rove’s book on “The Triumph of William McKinley.” That 1896 campaign may sound obscure, but it relates directly to our challenge.

McKinley was faced with the great charismatic Democratic leader, the youngest major party nominee in history at 36 years old, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan is such a great passionate articulator of demagogic populism and was so influential in the Democratic Party for two generations (nominated three times for president) that Elizabeth Warren is his direct emotional descendant.

He literally – and I mean this as a tribute to Bryan – h e imprinted the Democratic Party with a negative, anti-elite, anti-city, anti-modernity kind of populism, a populism of anger. He talks about mankind being crucified on a cross of gold. He says at one point that he wants grass to grow on the streets of the cities. McKinley realizes he’s going to lose the election unless he breaks the heart of Bryan’s argument. McKinley understood in 1896 what Margaret Thatcher said in the 1970’s when she warned: “First you win the argument. Then you win the election.” And so, McKinley created the most thorough educational campaign in American history.

They printed 18 brochures for every American. That’s a scale of organization that’s unimaginable. And Karl, who’s a great professional, really walks you through it. The first part of the book most of it you won’t find all that exciting, because it’s about how he got the nomination – although it’s very useful. But the second half of the book is amazing and is the campaign we need this year.

We need a campaign that is going right at the philosophical basis of the modern Democratic Party. We need a campaign, for example, to say, “How many Americans do you think want to abolish the Medicare trust fund?” That’s actually what’s in the Sanders bill that could create national health care. You know, to the average 65-year-old or 55-year-old say, “Hi, would you like to help Sanders in abolishing the Medicare Trust Fund? All it requires is that you trust politicians.”

You know, you could probably win that argument and keep them on defense all the time. So, I think it’s tremendously important. I think what Ronna is doing is extraordinarily important. She needs your help and every state in the country. I need your help talking to every incumbent and every candidate, and you need to understand, this is where we’re going. This is what we have to accomplish, and my last point is this: 50 percent should be spent on the tax cuts.

I mean literally, 50 percent of our effort should be explaining the tax cuts and their impact at multiple levels. At a cultural level, it puts America back on the road to being an entrepreneurial society. At the large economy level, it’s going to lead to growth – and at a personal level. When I talk about the example of reaching out to everyone, would you like to guess among all the Wal-Mart employees who just got bonuses what percent are African American? What percent are Latino?

Now today, they have no mechanism to say to them: “By the way, that was a Republican idea that just got money in your pocket.” That’s our job. It’s not their fault they don’t know it, and it’s certainly not NBC News’ fault. NBC News is the other team. So, we have to learn, and I would urge all of you to think about this literally. Fifty percent of our effort from now to election day should be very simple. We want you to have money in your pocket, a better job, a greater future, more money in your 401k for retirement. They want all of that money for their bureaucrats and their giveaways. You pick which team you like. You think it’s better to have Washington spend your money, you have a great party: The Democrats. If you think it’s better for you to have the money, you have a great party, the Republicans. The two parties are this far apart.

As RNC members, if you’ll do your job, if you’ll help convince every single candidate and every single incumbent, we’ll change history just the way Trump changed history.

So, when reporters and analysts say, “Well, it’s the first term off-year election. The average losses are X.” My first thought is, “How do you think President Clinton is doing?”

The truth is we are led by somebody who breaks the records. We ought to join in this fall to break the record, and next year if we have won control of the House altogether – if we’ve picked up six or eight Senate seats – President Trump and the Republicans will be able to say, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Newt Gingrich is a Fox News contributor. A Republican, he was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Follow him on Twitter @NewtGingrich. His latest book is “Understanding Trump.”

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GOP frontrunner Donald Trump explained why he held a meeting in Washington, D.C. with members of Congress, lobbyists, and political operatives on Monday.

“Just to start getting together with some of the people that I’ve known over the years, politicians in just about all cases,” he said during his press conference at the Old Post Office, which is being renovated into Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“They were senators or congressmen, [and president of the Heritage Foundation] Jim DeMint was there, who I have great respect for,” Trump told the press conference.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) reportedly did not know about the meeting.

Trump was asked if that was intentional. Trump said he’s “very inclusive,” and it wasn’t intentional for McConnell and Ryan not to be there.

Politico reports, “The handful of lawmakers who did attend – including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) – were mainly those who had already endorsed Trump or voted for him in a primary, although Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who also attended, is neutral in the race.”

Former GOP presidential candidate and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was reportedly also in attendance.

Trump said the meeting was a “very good one,” with some of the “most respected people in Washington.”____________________________

For people who say there is nothing left for the public to learn about Hillary Clinton’s emails or her actions surrounding the Benghazi terror attacks, Democrats on the House select committee spent an awful lot of time Thursday attacking colleagues who asked reasonable questions. And Secretary Clinton spent an awful lot of time filibustering to run out the clock.

Little more than a week after Clinton said in a presidential debate that the enemy she was proudest of is “probably the Republicans”, she, the media, and allies in her party tried their hardest to portray the hearing as nothing more than a partisan Republican charade.

Evidently they did not see “partisan” motives in Democrats questioning the Secretary like they were her team of defense attorneys, or in their personal attacks on Republican committee members in place of questions for Hillary, or in the repeated complaints about the committee’s very existence. (The committee, of course, was created when Congress discovered that the Obama administration had failed to produce relevant documents in defiance of a Congressional request.)

Only one Democrat, Tammy Duckworth, even bothered to ask real questions about the attack that left four Americans dead or the administration’s response to it.

As Hillary grinned in agreement, Adam Smith, a leading Democrat on the committee, used one of his entire rounds of questioning to complain that the public had learned “nothing new” during the hearing. This was a quite a grievance from someone who spent the entire day trying to debunk the effort to learn anything new. And no doubt we would know even less if Congressman Smith and Secretary Clinton had their way.

If he had listened to the questions of his professional colleagues, Mr. Smith might have noticed that the public did learn some significant information Thursday.

Congressman Jim Jordan revealed in his questioning that Secretary Clinton knew the night of the attack that the violence was planned and carried out by a terrorist group. She wrote it in an email to her family.

Then we learned that the next day she told the Egyptian Prime Minister, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film…It was a planned attack – not a protest.”

In other words, Secretary Clinton’s email and phone records immediately after attack directly contradict the statements she made to victims’ family members days later, and the statements many members of the Obama administration continued to make for weeks.

Secretary Clinton has repeatedly blamed “the fog of war” for the false information she helped spread about the source of the attacks.

The documents we learned about yesterday prove that she (and very likely other senior administration officials) were not nearly as confused as they led the public to believe.

It is remarkable that the Democrats on the committee were so completely uninterested in the discrepancy between what the administration knew and what it said publicly that they neglected to ask even a single question about the subject.

It is even more remarkable that the news media shows every sign of cooperating in this effort to paper over this new information.

We have a presidential candidate who began her career working for a Congressional committee examining Watergate, and we have a generation of journalists who supposedly idolize the writers who inspired that investigation.

Now respectively the subject and the reporters of equally serious questions of public trust, both insist there is nothing important to see here. And who’s partisan, again?

(click here)Representative Chaffetz was stunned by the announcement. In lieu of McCarthy’s announcement he vote for Speakership has been postponed.

As reported earlier. Speaker of the House John Boehner was ridiculed today when his hand picked man quit. This was not expected but welcomed. Kevin McCarthy was in for the fight of his life to become the next Speaker of the house. Now we expect the chances of Jason Chaffetz to be good.

The vote for a new speaker is set for October 22. Boehner already indicated his choice, a John Boenher clone, Kevin McCarthy. This does not sit well with the conservative Tea Party members of Congress who brought about the revolution we are seeing today.

Jason Chaffetz of Utah has thrown his hat into the ring. Right now the vote is too close to call. We are anticipating a ruthless knock ‘m down fight for Speaker. Under Boehner’s speaker ship we have seen Obama run rough shod over the House of Representatives. We have the purse strings but failed to use our authority to stop POTUS in his tracks.

Jason Chaffetz will see to it that a different path is taken, one that will seeks to enforce the power it was given by the Constitution. This has not been done under Boehner’s leadership.

“If we don’t inject new blood into the leadership team, our constituents are going to be irate at best,” Chaffetz told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday. “There’s a massive drumbeat out there that the status quo is not what we sent you there to perpetuate. This is a national wave, it’s not something that was driven by Jason Chaffetz. I’m just someone who was smart enough to recognize it and try to get ahead of it.”